Environmental policy evaluation in the EU: between learning,accountability, and political opportunities?

ABSTRACT

Policy evaluation has grown significantly in the EU environmental sector since the 1990s. In identifying and exploring the putative drivers behind its rise – a desire to learn, a quest for greater accountability, and a wish to manipulate political opportunity structures – new ground is broken by examining how and why the existing literatures on these drivers have largely studied them in isolation. The complementarities and potential tensions between the three drivers are then addressed in order to advance existing research, drawing on emerging empirical examples in climate policy, a very dynamic area of evaluation activity in the EU. The conclusions suggest that future studies should explore the interactions between the three drivers to open up new and exciting research opportunities in order to comprehend contemporary environmental policy and politics in the EU.     

Divestment discourse: war,justice, morality and money

The fossil fuel divestment movement has been a vibrant novel development in climate change politics in recent years, particularly in North America. Here, the character of the discourse used to promote divestment as a strategy is explored. The divestment discourse is shown to rest on four overlapping narratives, those of war and enemies, morality, economics and justice. All four are clearly discernible in statements from movement activists, in coverage of divestment campaigns by major news sources and in the movement’s aims, objectives and strategies covered in alternative media. The war narrative, with the formulation of fossil fuel companies as enemies to be overcome to ensure survival, is the dominant narrative. By polarising climate action and identifying an antagonist against which to mobilise, divestment discourse has articulated climate change as an explicitly political phenomenon, in contrast to the primarily consensus and collaboration-based approaches that have predominated in climate politics.     

Governance via persuasion: environmental NGOs and the social licence to operate

The ‘social licence to operate’ (SLO) concept is increasingly associated with environmental activism in nations with prominent resource extractive industries. Environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) deploy it as a campaigning strategy to contest corporate activity, in particular, the environmental sustainability of existing or planned commercial projects. Drawing on two prominent Australian ENGO campaigns – against Seafish Tasmania’s Abel Tasman vessel and Tassal’s proposed fish farm operations on Tasmania’s east coast – the SLO strategy is assessed in the context of the governance literature, arguing that it constitutes ‘governance via persuasion’, a mode that incorporates appeals to normative values. Australian SLO campaigns are primarily directed at the state, promoting opportunities for ENGOs to shape reviews and revisions to environmental regulation alongside governmental and corporate actors. SLO campaigns are therefore a contemporary expression of environmental strategies seeking regulatory change in contrast to ENGO-led private governance initiatives that often bypass the state.     

Greening the Congressional record: environmental social movements and expertise-based access to the policy process

ABSTRACT

A new dataset of organizational testimony at U.S. Congressional hearings on environmental protection is used to examine how social movement organizations use issue expertise to gain access to the policy process. Environmental movement organizations (EMOs) are shown to testify in greater numbers at hearings that consider proposed legislation, compared to hearings that are exploratory or investigatory in nature. The increased representation at legislative hearings is unique to EMOs; other kinds of organizations do not obtain similar increases in legislative access. These findings suggest that, due to their scientific expertise and perceived legitimacy, EMOs receive privileged access to the policy process relative to other organizations affected by environmental policy and at a later stage than has been proposed by prior work examining social movement access to the policy process.     

Greener governments: partisan ideologies,executive institutions,and environmental policies

Why do some governments have more environmentally friendly policies than others? Part of the answer involves governing parties’ ideological positions on environmentalism and the constraints imposed by executive institutions. Here, this party-based explanation is elaborated and tested with uniquely comparable indicators of national environmental policies for governments in 27 countries in the European Union (EU). The findings show that governments with parties that emphasized environmental protection in their manifestos are more likely to propose pro-environment policies during EU-level negotiations. However, the effect of ideology is mediated by the centralization of the national executive branch. In centralized national executives, the environmental positions of prime ministers’ parties affect policies, while in decentralized national executives, the positions of environment ministers’ parties are relevant. The findings have implications for understanding the impact of parties’ environmental positions on government policies, as well as for policy making in coalitions more generally.